ABFFE Book Review: A Shadow of Red by David Everitt

Book Review by Audrey Eisman

        Everitt, David. A Shadow of Red: Communism and the Blacklist in Radio and Television (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2007), 978-1566635752.

In the years leading up to the Korean War, another war was being formulated.  It would attack people in the radio and television industry who were considered insufficiently patriotic.  The fight was launched in Counterattack: the Newsletter of Facts on Communism, a publication written by three ex-FBI staffers, Kenneth M. Bierly, John G. Keenan, and Theodore C. Kirkpatrick, who were veterans of the bureau’s New York-based “Communist Squad.”  Counterattack sought to expose people with connections with any group or person even remotely connected to communism, socialism, the Soviet Union, or progressive ideas.

In 1950, the former G-men created a new publication, Red Channels, which quickly became infamous as a tool that was used to enforce a blacklist that made it impossible for hundreds of writers, directors, actors and actresses to work in the broadcast industry.  A former naval intelligence officer, Vincent Hartnett, soon joined the team.  So did Laurence Johnson, a Syracuse supermarket owner who used his connection with the American Legion to threaten advertisers with boycotts if they hired people on the blacklist. 

David Everitt, a former magazine editor and a contributor to The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Biography, American History and other periodicals, wrote A Shadow of Red to “put the story of the radio and TV blacklist in its proper place within the context of early cold war politics.”  Everitt believes that the broadcast blacklist deserves to be studied separately from the purge of “subversives” that occurred in Hollywood.  Broadcasting employs many more individuals than the film industry and has a bigger audience. Furthermore, the broadcast industry is not just a supplier of entertainment but a source of information and opinion and therefore a target of political manipulation.  The broadcasting industry also depends on advertising, which means that small groups of zealots can gain a lot of power by threatening sponsors.

This is a very well written and fascinating examination of a dark time for the broadcasting industry.  Everitt details the efforts to censor CBS, which FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover once called “the Communist Broadcasting System.” Counterattack  claimed that CBS executives had the habit of hiring people who were at the very least “comrades of comrades.” 

Everitt also gives a vivid account of the libel trial in which attorney Louis Nizer represented radio personality John Henry Faulk in a lawsuit against AWARE, an organization headed by Hartnett that ended Faulk’s promising career by calling him a Communist.
 

Audrey Eisman spent several years working for ABFFE and the American Booksellers Association.  During that time, she helped organize Banned Books Week, the ABFFE silent auctions, and other ABFFE events.  She also wrote book reviews for ABFFE.  Since then, she has been a fundraiser for various non-profit organizations, is working on a book of her own, and serves as our free-lance book reviewer.
 

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